Israel’s genocidal war on Palestine

American Herald Tribune|Marwa Osman: The illegal founding of the Israeli entity has been ironically presented to the world as the noble and profound national recovery of a people who had suffered centuries of discrimination under the alleged Nazi extermination of the Jews of Europe.

Yet there remains a still repressed part of this story, the experience of several million people for whom the almost 70 years from the founding of this parasite entity to the present time have brought nothing but disaster and carnage upon them. They are the people of Palestine.

For me, Palestine’s suffering under the unjustified aggression of the Zionist entity can be compressed to an eternal 45 minutes. It is the time that Muhammad Al Durrah’s father tried in vain to shield him from the Israeli rain of gunfire as they both ducked against a concrete wall in the Gaza Strip. The whole scene for 45 minutes was caught on camera with the footage showing the boy’s father, Jamal Al Durrah, waving desperately to Israeli occupying forces, shouting out 2 words only: “Don’t shoot”. Towards the end, the young 12 year old boy who was intentionally hit by four bullets, collapsed helplessly in his father’s arms while his soul rose up to its creator taking his father’s purpose for life along with him.

I was exactly Muhammad’s age when I was watching his death on TV in the year 2000, asking my parents: why is no one helping him? I got no answer as my mom wiped away her tears and my dad simply changed the channel since my younger siblings might be watching too. It struck me harder later on that evening when I heard my uncle say that even the ambulance driver who tried to rescue the boy and his father was also killed. Why? For what? How many people have watched Muhammad die before their eyes and did absolutely nothing? Said absolutely nothing?

Those 45 minutes are more than enough to prove that Israel is a killing machine that deliberately targets children. It did so both in Palestine and Lebanon, and continues to do so in Palestine while the world is deaf to the cries of our babies.

After its great defeat in the Lebanon 2006 war, Israel became more brutal towards the Palestinians in Gaza, bombing them with top notch weaponry, most of which is internationally banned. There is no question that the policy of the Zionist government is to only destroy life in Gaza. They have demolished all the working facilities of electricity, water supply, sewage systems; they are making it unfit for life while blockading the people of Gaza and besieging them so they can find nowhere to hide. All this for one sole purpose: to create an exclusive Israeli state only for Jewish colonial settlers on Palestinian stolen land. Why? Because they believe God promised them so. Yes, you read that correctly.

No question that there exists a global opinion which voices its support for Palestine and openly condemns the Zionist Israeli genocide against the people of Palestine. However, Israel continues to kill because it feels it has impunity from western governments and elites steered by the US government which continues to supply arms, massive amounts of funds and provide diplomatic protection for the genocide which is still taking place.

War without mercy is the official Israeli policy. It is crystal clear that the rule of law doesn’t apply on the Zionists. Throughout its entire history of illegal existence, Israel has waged genocidal war on Palestine. From the very beginning, its 1947-48 War of Occupation prioritized an exclusive Jewish state with no Arab presence. They put their strategy into effect and their means to end process was mass murder, destruction and forced displacement.

Even in the occupied territories of the West Bank, Palestinians are denied fundamental rights that everyone deserves and they live in constant fear. A fear that seems to be increasing as senior Zionist officials have been encouraging Israeli soldiers and police to kill Palestinians they only suspect of possibly attacking Israeli colonial settlers even when they are no longer a threat. Which means Israel might soon legalize the excessive use of force on any Palestinian outside his house.

Senior Israeli politicians, including the police minister and war minister, having been blatantly calling on police and occupying soldiers to shoot to kill suspected attackers, irrespective of whether lethal force is actually strictly necessary to protect life. In this case, to protect the life of a criminal to begin with.

If you are a Palestinian in Gaza you are destined to be killed any second and if you are a Palestinian in the West Bank, occupying military orders control virtually all aspects of your life. You will have to endure economic suffocation and collective punishment. You will be brutalized. It doesn’t matter if you are a Muslim or a Christian, you will most probably be killed for praying to the “wrong” God or for just being an Arab. You will be denied free movement, free expression and public assembly. You will be isolated in enclosed population centers and you will have no right to object.

You will remain silent or you will be killed. On second thought, even if you are silent, you will be killed. You are a Palestinian, from the moment you are born, you are destined to live and die in oppression.